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NBC didn’t take the Hillary Clinton UFO bait during Sunday night’s primary debate, staged just a couple of weeks after the former Secretary of State vowed to “get to the bottom of” The Great Taboo. As per tradition, the mainstream media tossed a lot of confetti in the air over her UFO remarks before getting bored and wandering off. But in doing so, they forget – assuming they ever knew – about the formidable and unremitting curiosity of Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta.

In 2002, the former Clinton White House chief of staff joined the ad hoc Coalition for Freedom of Information in a federal lawsuit against NASA for access to files related to the so-called Kecksburg incident of 1965. Although that initiative, spearheaded by independent investigative journalist Leslie Kean, produced no smoking gun, the effort shook loose hundreds of previously unreleased documents, revealed that many others had been destroyed or went missing, and forced the space agency to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees.

It’s going to be a long and tedious slog, but any hopes of reaching the ground floor of Uncle Sam’s relationship with UFOs will require punching through layers of bureaucratic sediment/CREDIT: bovilla.com

We may never know what, if anything, Podesta attempted to accomplish on the UFO front during his time as senior adviser in the Obama White House. But he has a roadmap for how to attack the archives on multiple fronts. Or rather, he has access to a strategy promoted by a network of scholars, historians and researchers known as the Sign Historical Group (SHG).

In 2002, with decades invested in clawing through the brambles of federal acronyms stretching back to World War II, SHG says it sent a detailed proposal to Podesta about what to look for, and where. It updated that pitch online in 2014. For member Jan Aldrich, director of the even more specialized Project 1947, the logical – and perhaps only – way to understand the controversy is to toggle the FOIA time machine back to when the U.S. military actually left a paper trail in its efforts to comprehend the incomprehensible. Nearly 70 years later, he argues, the gatekeepers still aren’t on top of this mess.

“The government may have better data,” says Aldrich in an email to De Void, “but they are still puzzled.” Want answers? Then forget about drilling into the gold mine using more recent cases. “If there is more definitive information in the government’s possession,” he adds, “then I would think it would be [at] some high level government scientific lab or … in the compartmentalized stove pipes of special surveillance programs.”

The way SHG sees it, the “Holy Grail of Ufology” is 68 years old. It’s a report whose title is so banal – “Estimate of the Situation,” or EOTS — it sounds like it was written to be invisible. EOTS was the product of the USAF’s first official inquiry into the “flying disc” phenomenon. The brass called it Project Sign, the namesake of SHG. In 1948, Sign analysts from Wright-Patterson AFB’s Technical Intelligence Division sized up the problem and prepared a draft, or estimate, venturing that UFOs likely had “interplanetary” origins. USAF Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg rejected their best guess and demanded another.

In a November ’48 come-to-Jesus showdown that would probably make a great David Mamet drama, members of the Sign team were assembled in Washington, D.C., and told what to write. Dissenters were reassigned.

“The Estimate died a quick death,” wrote USAF Capt. Edward Ruppelt, who directed the more widely known successor, Project Blue Book, in 1956. “Some months later it was completely declassified and relegated to the incinerator. A few copies, one of which I saw, were kept as mementos of the golden days of the UFOs.” Remaining copies of EOTS have not been located.

But EOTS is just a small piece of the puzzle. SHG’s strategy, broken into categories and subcategories, runs 43 pages and offers numerous leads, most based on existing documents. If a picture paints a thousand words, the payoffs from references from one source alone — a document called “History of Air Technical Intelligence Center 1 July 1952-31 December 1952” — could be incalculable. According to that summary, ATIC’s mission was “to investigate and analyse [cq] reports of unidentified aerial objects or of phenomena of possible concern to the air defense of the US” and to “produce air technical and scientific intelligence studies and estimates of alien capabilities to conduct aerial warfare.”

To that end, states a “Technical Requirements Division” paper, “the installation of gun cameras in F-86’s assigned to the Fighter Squadron at Wright-Patterson Air Base was assured. The purpose of these installations is to provide suitable photographs during flights resulting from reports or sightings of unidentified flying objects.” Furthermore, “15 officer Air Attaches, 10 airmen, 27 ATLO’s [assembly test and launch operations personnel] and 37 investigators” received specialized training. They fanned out into three states “to investigate flying object reports. To date, 100 videon stereoscopic cameras, equipped with diffraction gratings over one lens, have been procured and received at ATIC.”

So what happened to the pix?

And SHG isn’t just poking around for military records – what is the CIA hanging onto? SHG takes aim at an “unremittingly pedestrian” narrative published in 1997 by Agency historian Gerald K. Haines. His CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 paper issued the absurd and unsubstantiated claim that more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and 1960s could be explained by high-altitude spy planes.

“Following a lawsuit,” writes SHG, “the CIA released about 900 pages of UFO documents. However, this and later releases by the CIA does not represent the total material on the subject, which has been estimated to be at least 16,000 pages. Furthermore, there are documents held by the Navy, Air Force, FBI, Army and others, which give important insight into the CIA’s activities here. Most of these documents were apparently unknown to Haines, and some are little known to many in the UFO field. Also, Haines apparently is unaware of the huge amount of data in multiple copies, which went to the CIA from other agencies, further indicating the whole story has not been made available to the public.”

AFCRL, AMC, SAC, MERINT, CIRVIS, MATS — the Sign Historical Group’s list of data suspects goes on and on. So John Podesta’s call for accountability isn’t just some vague quirky “X-Files” exhortation. It’s a demand for closing the gaps in official history. After all, we did pay for it, so we do own it. Check out SHG’s ideas for getting this stuff back, at http://www.project1947.com/shg/cfi/sfcfiproposal.htm. De Void came away from it with just one question: Why do we still allow the dead WWII crowd who made the original classification decisions to keep telling us what we can and can’t handle?

Forget the UFO angle for a moment. Looks like U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has a problem. Potentially “catastrophic,” actually, in its own words. But since De Void is just an obscure little UFO blog and the mainstream media doesn’t cover this stuff anyway, the feds will probably luck out and nobody else will notice.

Late Friday afternoon, De Void received an explanation for the agency’s refusal to release a very specific piece of footage one of its surveillance planes acquired over Aguadilla, Puerto Rico on the evening of April 25, 2013. In defending its decision to reject De Void’s FOIA appeal, the feds said releasing the video would compromise law enforcement investigations. Specifically, CBP cited Title 5 U.S.C. 552 (b)(7)(E). Here’s the accompanying explanation:

“Releasing this video would identify the techniques practiced by the agency during the clandestine aerial tracking of the plane. Most notably, it shows the specific vantage point from which CBP prefers to conduct its clandestine surveillance in relation to the target plane. Bad actors can identify specifically from what altitude, directional positioning, airspeed, and distance CBP hopes to surveil while avoiding the detection from its targets. The on-screen metadata compounds the issue. The bands of text at the top and bottom of the screen alleviates any guesswork on their behalf, specifically providing such exact information as the CBP aircraft’s airspeed, altitude, and the GPS coordinates of both the aircraft and the surveillance target.

A federal agency says posting one of its surveillance videos could be catastrophic; yet, it doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the contested video has been online for more than two years, and it isn’t even curious about a bogey that can fly and travel underwater and split into two parts/CREDIT: colourbox.com

“Taken in combination, this information would essentially provide bad actors with a map of where to look for CBP in the sky during smuggling operations. If the bad actors know where to spot CBP aircraft, they will be far better at ferreting out CBP’s attempts to track and surveil them and could subsequently attempt evasive measures, abort their mission, or attack their pursuers. Additionally, both the actual video and the on-screen metadata, if released, would arm smugglers with the type of information that could lead to the circumvention of CBP’s surveillance efforts. Bad actors could extend the perimeter of their counter-surveillance operations, or focus their efforts on the specific locations from which CBP prefers to surveil. The results could be catastrophic, thwarting attempts to stop smuggling operations or exposing CBP law enforcement agents to attack. For all these reasons, we agree that FOIA Exemption (b)(7)(E) was correctly applied to the videotapes at issue.”

Well, if that’s true, the followup is pretty obvious: How much damage has this video caused to U.S. Customs? Have the results been catastrophic? Because the controversial sequence – which features roughly two minutes of a small flying object with no discernible means of propulsion hurtling over the coastal town of Aguadilla, skimming into the ocean at more than 80 mph, submerging, then splitting in two before flying off again – has been on the Internet since 2014. And last August, an independent group called the Scientific Coalition for Ufology published a lengthy analysis online of this remarkable nocturnal encounter, which was recorded in thermal mode by a top-drawer Wescam Model MX-15D.

Last year, SCU team members told De Void their unnamed source went public following a lack of curiosity from the agency’s chain of command. Considering how CBP is responsible for securing our borders, one might think somebody somewhere along the way would be at least somewhat concerned about a bogey without a transponder that not only penetrates our air space with ease, but gives a dramatic demonstration, for the record, of its capabilities in our territorial waters as well. Not to mention that the unauthorized intrusion resulted in a 16-minute flight delay from a nearby airport, which amounts to a de facto air-safety issue.

De Void filed the FOIA in an effort to a) independently confirm the provenance of the video, and b) to compare the officially released footage with SCU’s version to check for redactions and discrepancies. When De Void sought clarification Monday from Shari Suzuki, CBP’s Chief of FOIA Appeals, Policy and Litigation Branch, about the logic of withholding a classified video that’s been available to “bad actors” and everyone else in the world for more than two years, the robo-reply read “This email address is no longer accepting email correspondence,” and referred me back to the agency’s FOIA office. Actually — wait, back up. In her denial of my appeal on Friday, Suzuki referred me to the Office of Government Information Services, which is apparently where you go to resolve FOIA disputes with federal agencies in hopes of avoiding litigation. De Void let the posted phone number ring and ring and ring and ring and ring on Monday until it became clear that leaving a voice message wasn’t an option. Or maybe they recognized De Void’s whiny number. Anyhow, that’s when De Void fired off an email to the prescribed OGIS address. They’ll probably jump right on it.

One of the reasons SCU’s examination of the Aguadilla UFO is among the most impressive on record is precisely because of the “on-screen metadata” Suzuki alluded to in her rejection of De Void’s FOIA. It gave researchers an avalanche of context about this true unknown. As for the leak doing “catastrophic” damage to the agency’s surveillance program? SCU co-author Robert Powell blows it off.

Appropriately, years after the neglected fringe began debating the “Rockefeller Initiative” that triggered the Clinton administration’s backdoor interest in UFOs, it took a reporter at a small daily in New Hampshire to pop the question to the former First Lady. Suddenly, boom, Hillary Clinton’s reply circles the globe within hours. The majors jumped all over it, a wildly eclectic lot, from the Fleet Street Cassandras to the inside-baseball types at Poynter and The Hill.

It’s safe to say that no major presidential campaign has ever wagered on getting mileage out of The Great Taboo/CREDIT: guystuffcounseling.com

This shouldn’t be terribly surprising. UFOs generate beaucoup traffic, especially when attached to politicians’ names. Most of what’s cropping up are echo-chamber reverb summaries of Hillary’s quotes, such as “Yes, I’m going to get to the bottom of it” if elected and “I think we may have been (visited already). We don’t know for sure.” And, if precedent holds, any original reporting on the Clinton White House’s UFO intrigues will be a fluke.

But no serious presidential candidate has ever been so conversational about The Great Taboo. What Conway Daily Sun reporter Daymond Steer found most interesting about the buildup to his dropping the U-word on the Democratic frontrunner last week was the consistency with which campaign manager John Podesta has been flagging the gorilla in the room. From his famous video exhortation at the National Press Club in 2002 to his 2010 endorsement of Leslie Kean’s UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record to his February 2015 farewell tweet as Obama White House advisor (“my biggest failure …. Once again not securing the disclosure of the UFO files”), the veteran pol and “X-Files” fan has established a clear pattern. The peanut gallery likes to attribute it to a glib sense of humor, but Podesta went back and hit it again in September. “Great interview,” he tweeted at “Girls” star Lena Dunham following her online sit-down with the ex-State Department Secretary. “But Lena, ask her about aliens next time!!” And he didn’t mean Mexicans.

Unlike most Beltway geniuses, Steer has actually been paying attention to this issue. He told De Void his UFO query was pretty much a no-brainer. “They’ve been opening the door,” he said. “I just walked in.” Steer said Clinton’s joviality that characterized their brief chat might make her professed commitment to investigating UFOs “open to interpretation.” (Exhibit A: George W. Bush, Y2K.) But he added, “She seems to have fun talking about it.” Indeed, this wasn’t Steer’s first discussion with her about The Great Taboo. During Clinton’s primary swing through New Hampshire in 2007, Steer wrote, the then-Senator informed him that “the No. 1 topic of freedom-of-information requests that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, received at his library was UFOs.”

One of the most tenacious authors of those requests was and is Canadian researcher Grant Cameron. An old hand at navigating the FOIA system, the Winnipeg resident began fishing for UFO-related material in 2001, before Clinton left office. He squeezed it in at the last minute to avoid the long waiting period that kicks in for the release of presidential docs once the chief executive steps down. What Cameron got – from Clinton’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) – was a trove of 1,000 memos, letters, correspondences, etc., detailing a three-year effort by billionaire Laurance Rockefeller to get a face-to-face with the Clintons about UFOs.

Included in the paper cache was the draft of a letter to President Clinton, prepared by Rocky, requesting three things: 1) prioritizing UFOs for classification review, 2) a formal government office pulling that information together, and 3) amnesty for whistle-blowers. “It is widely believed that various agencies of the federal government have substantial information concerning the existence or non-existence of UFOs,” the draft stated, “and that it has been unnecessarily withheld from the public as classified for reasons of national security.” The draft was forwarded to OSTP chief John Gibbons in November 1995 by Rocky’s attorney Henry Diamond. Diamond also indicated that his famous client “has been discussing [the letter] with Mrs. Clinton and her staff.” Three months later, in a followup letter to Gibbons, Rockefeller wrote “You indicated that you will keep the First Lady’s Office informed, and we shall as well.”

With his boss and long-time friend commanding a big lead in primary polling, John Podesta is promoting a most unorthodox conversation /CREDIT: beforeitsnews.com

The Clintons eventually met with Rockefeller at his Jackson Hole ranch in August 1995. The particulars of what transpired are not contained in the FOIA returns. But what happened to those 1,000 released documents between 2001 and today? Although the Rockefeller papers were posted online several years ago, Grant Cameron says his FOIAs for that stuff and additional material – from both the National Archives and the Clinton Presidential Library – have drawn blanks.

The latest notification from the CPL’s supervisory archivist, dated 10/28/15, stated “We were only able to locate 42 pages because they did not show up as a specific hit in our electronic searches.” Records-keeper Dana Simmons noted “we do not have document level control over our entire collection,” and that their folder-specific system makes it “impossible” to find what he wanted in an initial search.

“It must be some kind of bureaucratic mixup,” says Cameron, noting it makes no sense to hide documents already in the public domain. “But if you go to the National Archives or the Clinton Library wanting to do research on the Rockefeller Initiative, those documents don’t exist. If a reporter wants to follow up on this story, the logical question is, where are the documents?”

Ultimately, Cameron says, Clinton’s UFO remarks in New Hampshire couldn’t have been as whimsical as they might have appeared. “She made a risky move, especially after what happened to (Democratic presidential candidate Dennis) Kucinich in 2007,” he says, alluding to Tim Russert’s got-cha UFO bomb during a primary debate. Whatever slim hopes Kucinich entertained of earning the nomination fell into the wood chipper.

The next Democratic debate is Jan. 17. The Kucinich debacle came from out of nowhere. But the Hillary-UFO connection has been telegraphed by her own campaign manager. “Keep your eye on Podesta,” says Cameron. “He’s behind the whole thing, ay?”

2015 produced so many candidates for De Void’s Jessica Flores Disembodied Head Award for UFO Journalism it’d be a shame to exclude anybody from the honors. An even bigger shame is that Flores’ employer, Fox 10 out in Phoenix, decided to yank her 2014 report that so succinctly sums up the American media’s relationship with The Great Taboo. If you didn’t catch it, well, trust me, you missed something special, a real meteor blaze across the cosmos.

Anyway, the biggest story of 2015 was how the feds got caught flat-footed with a video recording of a bona fide unknown over Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. True, the nighttime sequence captured by thermal optics on a state-of-the-art Wescam had been leaked by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol employees in 2013. But a detailed forensic analysis of that event – released online by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in August – begged for feedback from somebody, anybody, Border Patrol or its umbrella, the Department of Homeland Security, especially given how the incident caused a flight delay at a nearby airport. So far, Uncle Sam has refused to comment. And the media – well, mainstream media coverage was a no-show as well.

Here’s to a brand new start in 2016, when things will get better/CREDIT: smosh.com

What we got instead were endless cascades of Jessica Flores Disembodied Head sideshows. Although the New York Times couldn’t be bothered with Aguadilla, it managed to find room to address a low-level buzz triggered by two nighttime sub-launched missile tests off Los Angeles in November. With weird-contrail videos and ET chatter popping up online, and despite the Navy owning up days earlier, the Times weighed in with Solid Gold from Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer. “Short of a good explanation,” Shermer reassured Times readers, “people just turn to the one that most immediately comes to mind which, in pop culture, is extraterrestrials.”

If that’s true, UFO zealots have themselves to blame. The biggest oxygen-sucking fiasco of 2015 was the $20 live-streaming farce from Mexico City in May. That’s when, to great fanfare, two photos of Native American museum mummies were touted as cadavers from the 1947 Roswell crash. The setup was so amateurish that critics were able to decipher the true origins within days. Mummygate became the sort of radioactive embarrassment that gives MSM management an excuse to pass on The Great Taboo, especially if you’re already predisposed to believe the whole field is populated by idiots.

However, that door swung both ways in 2015, beginning in January. That’s when John Greenewald, whose Black Vault website showcases tons of declassified government documents, decided to reformat and repost the USAF’s 45-year-old UFO records from Project Blue Book. Long available for public inspection, those files had languished online for years at Ancestry.com’s Fold3 site. Greenewald’s more streamlined version made the reports infinitely easier to navigate. Unfortunately, despite posting links to Fold3, Greenewald had to take the whole thing down when Ancestry threatened to sue for unauthorized use of its page images. But what happened between Greenewald’s original post and the cease-and-desist qualifies for a class-action omnidirectional Jessica Flores Disembodied Head Award.

USA Today, Fox News, the Chicago Sun-Times, CNN, the Washington Post, The Air Force Times, the New York Daily News, the Today show and local/regional media entities too numerous to name went batsh*t over what they proclaimed as the sudden release of the “Air Force’s top secret files.” I mean, this thing flat-out blew up. NBC’s Natalie Morales actually made a dingbat request to the Air Force for comment on this breaking non-news. Like everything else associated with The Great Taboo, the furor dissolved within a couple of news cycles. On the other hand, Greenewald’s short-lived version of Blue Book was so accessible, newspapers from no less than six states managed to localize and update long-ago UFO incidents that played out in their own local-circulation circles. Oddly enough, most of these smaller publications played it straight. Glimmers of hope …

There was an incipient political angle to UFO coverage that’ll no doubt sputter out as we get deeper into the 2016 campaign. It started in January, when Business Insider, of all things, noted that veteran Democratic pol John Podesta was leaving the Obama White House. Titled “The Man Who Might Lead Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Is Really Into UFOs,” the piece forged no new ground and merely regurgitated what researchers have been posting for years about the Clinton administration’s cat-and-mouse game with The Great Taboo. In February, on his way out the door, Podesta dropped a sly little firecracker on NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd in a tweet expressing regrets about “not securing the disclosure of the UFO files.” Only Mother Jones reporter A.J. Vicens has bothered to make a couple of followup passes at the linkage. But unless GOP strategists find a way to turn UFOs into a liability for Hillary, don’t hold your breath for more independent reporting on the connection.

Then there was CNN’s — holy cow, look at the time! The whole newsroom is already gone and getting loaded somewhere. OK, look, 2015, bottom line, the Jessica Flores Disembodied Head Award goes to everybody. There are no losers — celebrate!

Wonder how Argentina’s air force (FAA) would respond if a UFO were on track to bust the no-fly zone over the home of its president, as happened in the United States in 2008? Or if a UFO briefly parked over one of its busiest civilian airports – like in 2006, at Chicago O’Hare— and left behind recorded chatter between air traffic control and a freaked-out airline supervisor? What if one of Argentina’s federal agencies videotaped UFO activity over a civilian airport that created a flight delay, similar to what happened over Aguadilla, Puerto Rico in 2013?

These parallels are unavoidable in the wake of the FAA’s release of its first official report on UFOs since Argentina established a commission to check this stuff out in 2011. Spoiler alert: Argentina didn’t have much to work with. The good news: the report is too short and sketchy to put you to sleep.

Dear Santa Claus: This year I hope you and your elves (or is it “elfs,” like the Seven Dwarfs?) will bring the U.S. news media a set of brand new independent-thinking brains that will motivate them to cover government-sponsored UFO curiosity in South America. Failing that, I’ll settle for world peace /CREDIT: communication-director.com

Widely distributed online last week by Scott Corrales at Inexplicata: The Journal of Hispanic Ufology and Google-translated by Alejandro Rojas at OpenMinds, Argentina’s Commission for the Investigation of Aerospace Phenomena (CEFAe) apparently resolved every one of the dozen cases it contemplated in 2014-15. All were individual incidents based on testimony, video and still photos, and not a single one made a compelling argument for a true unknown. None involved radar. Explanations were at least “consistent with” a star, the moon, airplane and helicopter running lights, a satellite, a tossed ball, and Jupiter. One of the UFO candidates was discovered to be “a couple of lights Red stop antenna.” Oh, and some of the translations were a little rough.

Argentina’s presumed glasnost toward The Great Taboo is part of a wave of South American nations – Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil – whose governments have either established investigative bodies or made a show of transparency for private researchers. However, in a note to De Void, Inexplicata’s Corrales says there’s a reason Argentina’s inaugural report is so thin and arid:

“The South American air forces have been clear about this – the purpose of their ‘UFO’ research organizations is to insure safety of the airways, not to promote a frame of reference.” By that, Corrales means a hypothesis. “If anyone’s expecting this government interest and/or disclosure of files will further that frame of reference … they’re in for a surprise.”

Well, nobody with half a brain in an official capacity wants to get stuck with trying to prove what legitimate UFOs are. Still, the incidents CEFAe investigated were so pedestrian, it begs the question of how the Commission might manage more problematic encounters. CEFAe’s dispensing with a dozen yawners invites comparisons to the rigorous and meticulously detailed studies performed by the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP), the nonprofit that receives zero U.S. government support. Like CEFAe, NARCAP’s primary concern is air-traffic safety, which explains why Uncle Sam wants nothing to do with The Great Taboo. How would staging a we-don’t-know press conference about the Aguadilla enigma work to the Pentagon’s advantage? And, given its recent lurch to the right, maybe Argentina’s commitment to open analyses of UFOs will go the way of Project Blue Book.

“What I wonder,” Corrales wrote to De Void, “is whether the newly elected Argentinean government (Mauricio Macri) is going to be as inclined to promoting any release of military intelligence as his predecessor, who even accepted a petition from CEFORA, one of the UFO research organizations.”

Well, yeah, lefties are notorious for wanting to give away the farm. But what would happen if, before that window closes, the boss hog of Argentina’s military stepped up to the podium one day with a vetted Aguadilla-type UFO video and announced to the international media something like: Folks, this bogey made a joke of our restricted air space, averaged 80 mph after it entered the water, split into two separate objects before flying away, and we have no idea WTF it is …

CNN’s flailing relationship with The Great Taboo turned another page before its Tuesday night broadcast of the Republican debate in Las Vegas. In a 3-minute 18-second clip titled “How Nevada’s UFO hunters view the 2016 race,” producers followed three presumed researchers to the perimeters of Area 51 to grab uninteresting footage of lights in the night sky. “We” say presumed because the piece contains no narration, just a moody soundtrack punctuated with subtitled overlays and sound bites from three on-camera faces.

Considering how there’s no news hook tying the GOP contenders to the UFO issue, one assumes CNN was simply trying to show off how thoroughly it had covered every conceivable niche, and then some, in its debate buildup. Indeed, the online “UFO hunters” replay is filed in CNN’s “Politics” archives. Talk about Thinking Outside The Box – the producers even labeled one montage “The Cosmic Unconsciousness Of The 2016 Election,” without bothering to tell us what the hell they meant by that.

When it comes to prepping audiences for presidential debates, CNN’s imagineers clearly have no peers/CREDIT: happynicetimepeople.com

Before getting into “How Nevada’s UFO hunters view the 2016 race,” let’s remember that CNN has never known how to handle this nagging conundrum. Larry King used to do UFOs but he was the king of the non sequitur and could convert a physicist’s exposition on quarks into a question about cat food. Mostly, CNN regarded UFOs as wino skank.

As far back as 2007, during the presidential primary debates, then senior VP David Bohrman lamented to Wired magazine the wisdom of allowing YouTube “citizen journalists” to pose questions to the contenders. “If you would have taken the most-viewed questions last time,” Bohrman whined, “the top question would have been whether Arnold Schwarzenegger was a cyborg sent to save the planet Earth. The second most-viewed video was: Will you convene a national meeting on UFOs?”

On the other hand, false equivalencies aside, CNN implicitly concedes that UFOs do draw numbers. How else to explain its decision to live-stream, just three years later, a press conference in Washington, D.C., involving Air Force veterans delivering eyewitness accounts of UFO activity over America’s nuclear weapons facilities. Nope, their testimony was too de classe for a spot in CNN’s televised news cycle, but the stunt no doubt proved a boon for its online traffic. Go figure.

So like, just what is it about The Great Taboo, exactly, that wrings some of the sharpest minds on CNN into derivative ragwater? From Oscar-nominated filmmaker Morgan Spurlock to golden boy Anderson Cooper, UFOs have reduced their otherwise original perspectives into hack formulas that could’ve been hatched in a Dilbert strip. And please, spare me the lecture about how their evil puppet masters made ‘em do it. Cooper and Spurlock have plenty of options; they can always say no.

Anyhow, CNN did it again yesterday. With flashlights, grainy-green night-vision optics and the crunch of hiking boots across the desert floor, producers managed to find a “UFO hunter” named Alex Podovich who, believe it or not, finds a way to support both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders without chewing his own eyeballs out of their sockets. What do Podovich’s bifurcated political views have to do with UFOs? We’re never told. That’s probably what CNN means by “The Cosmic Unconsciousness of the 2016 Election.” You either get it or you don’t.

And then there’s a “UFO hunter” who calls himself BK Mojave. Amid the Nevada darkness, BK Mojave proclaims from the outset that “We are out here to look for ET!” He supports Trump because “I think he’s trying to save America.” The UFO connection? “I could be wrong, but the extraterrestrials tell me that Donald Trump is the one to, uh, lead America.” Well sure. The freak show. Finally.

But here’s what sets BK Mojave at a distance from the rank-and-file conspiracy subscribers. He doesn’t believe in full disclosure. Off camera voice: “If Trump gets elected, he’s there, he goes to Area 51, he sees whatever’s going on there, you don’t want him to tell you what he saw?” BK Movaje: “No. If it has to do with the war machine, no, keep that behind closed doors. If it has to do with, like, medicine or being able to light your house or my house of the city for free, then I think they should, uh, release that.”

Well that’s different. Somewhat.

The only “UFO hunter” who came even remotely close to making any sense was a guy named Mat Baroudi. “We all know something is going on,” he said. “But we never get to see the whole picture.” Dude, forget the whole picture. With CNN, we’re lucky to get coherence. When it comes to UFOs, CNN is the Titanic hitting an iceberg in 30 feet of water.

“If the Democrats retake the White House, Podesta will probably be a part of it, especially if it’s Clinton. My view is, they’re planning disclosure under the next administration.”

This was UFO lobbyist Stephen Bassett, speaking to De Void about former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta — in 2007. A year later, with the election coming down the home stretch, Bassett hypothesized that France and the United Kingdom opened their UFO records in order to force the U.S. to do likewise. “Look,” he said. “The United States is well on its way to irrelevance. Every first world country has an air force and every one has umpteen hours of gun-cam footage in their archives taken by chase planes. The pressure on the government (for disclosure) is probably greater now that it’s ever been.”

Then, of course, right after the 08 election came Bassett’s Million Fax on Washington, which – wait, wait, wait, hold up, Billy. Stop. Now. Just stop it … Deep breath … So OK, yeah, I’ve got this incurable glandular knee-jerk thing going on whenever the mainstream press tries to go UFO and misfires but nobody else in the media cares or even knows so what’s the point. Seriously. I mean, I myself can’t even vomit about it anymore. The piece that Washington Post reporter Ben Terris filed last Friday, that stale-news feature he buffed into a fresh viral sheen? Maybe that’s as good as it’s ever gonna get. And really, what’s the harm in letting Bassett rally the troops again (“I want to see disclosure by the New Hampshire primary. And I can make the case that it’s going to happen”). It’s just another toss-off profile in the “Style” section.

This Christmas season I pledge to relinquish my anger over The Washington Post’s UFO journalism/CREDIT: psych2go.net

“Style” is where you can make characters leap off the page with observational insights like how Bassett’s “expressive eyes … seem to go from blue to green.” Maybe if Terris had hung around a bit longer, Bassett’s pupils would’ve morphed into vertical slits. But we get the idea. And what a lonely quixotic journey this magnificent obsession has been. WaPo’s portrait even includes off-topic Bassett quotes like “It would be nice to have a mate, someone to share this with, or a kid that could likely go to the stars. But that ship has sailed.” Alas. No distant ship smoke on the horizon.

But don’t despair. “Style” is where, even though UFOs are so weird and kooky nobody can relate to them, you can write a story in a manner that allows us to recognize our common humanity, no matter how deviant or out of this world the material. Terris pulls it all together at the end with a conclusion that restores my faith in the nobility of suffering: “If only the people of Earth realize there’s something out there greater than us, (Bassett) said, perhaps then we can set aside the petty differences that are poised to destroy us. Lots of people pray for world peace. Is it so strange for Bassett to seek help from above?”

You may say he’s a dreamer. But he’s not the only one. And is it a coincidence that Christmas is right around the corner? I think not.

So anyway, no, I’m not going to get all bent out of shape anymore over the media’s ineptitude over the UFO issue. Nothing good ever comes of it, and as Lao Tzu says, when I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. However, between now and the time I fully unshackle my ego from the chains of desire, what I’d really desire at this point is for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to respond, by Christmas, to my FOIA appeal about why it can’t formally release the UFO footage that one of its planes recorded over Puerto Rico in 2013. Even though Customs whistleblowers leaked it into unauthorized hands more than two years ago and it’s all over the Internet now. If CBP could come through for me, I might even start believing in Santa Claus again.

During his appearance before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics in 1968, noted astronomer Carl Sagan helped drive another nail into the coffin of federally funded UFO research and offered an alternative. He did so at a time when the University of Colorado was wrapping up its $313,000 contract to get the UFO monkey off the U.S. Air Force’s back and reassure the American public that everything was under control.

Equating said research to what Scottish journalist Charles MacKay described as junk science in his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Sagan mentioned the sprawling Arecibo Observatory dish in Puerto Rico – or practically any other project that didn’t debase itself with UFOs – as a more adult way to discover ET intelligence. “I believe it would be much better advised,” he told the committee, “to support the biology, the Mariner, and Voyager programs of NASA, and the radio astronomy programs of the National Science Foundation, than to pour very much money into this study of UFOs.”

“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course” — Peter Drucker/CREDIT: junk-culture.com

Well, we know how that turned out. The radioastronomy crowd went on to monopolize the conversation, acquire limited but not insignificant federal dollars, and became the voice of orthodoxy when it comes to proclaiming what does and doesn’t constitute acceptible research into ETI. But now that even the National Science Foundation appears to be bailing on SETI, De Void can’t help but feel a little empathy for this small but smart and talented fraternity. True, they’re waist-deep in denial and they’re guilty of intellectual dishonesty in their successful efforts to wipe the Great Taboo off the table. But once upon a time, they were ridiculed as mercilessly as UFO researchers – and they learned how to adjust, adapt and play the game. Lately, however, it appears as if last summer’s $100 million SETI windfall is giving the NSF a chance to get what it wants as well – out.

Gizmodo recently took a look at the blowback created in July when Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced his intentions to lay a hundred big on SETI over the next 10 years. He called his private initiative Breakthrough Listen, with earmarks for Arecibo. In the ensuing kerfuffle that flared in Scientific American, the NSF announced it would drop its Arecibo funding if Milner went through with it. That provoked a broadside from Arecibo’s operations director Robert Kerr, who eventually resigned:

“This new situation waxes unscrupulous. The NSF now insists that we do commercial, non-peer-reviewed science so they can divest – and show positively that Arecibo no longer does mainstream radio astronomy and is thus unworthy for NSF investment. Amazing.”

Well, everybody’s a little cash-strapped these days – everybody but fatcats like Milner, that is – but it’s hard to blame the NSF for wanting to disentangle itself from a theory that has generated no ETI data to analyze. Even amid the promising harvest of exoplanets identified by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, SETI has discerned no signal amid the noise. Most recently, in September, wishful hearts started fluttering when scientists began speculating about an “alien megastructure” that might be dimming the light emitted from a distant star named KIC 8462852. SETI scientists aimed their scopes at the phenomenon but, as usual, got nothing. The fact that radiotelescopes couldn’t find a non-random signal doesn’t necessarily disqualify an alien superstructure from the suspect list. But what this incident probably gives us is additional confirmation that employing radio signals to locate ETI — especially in total disregard for all other disciplines — is an obsolete idea.

But hey, if jillionaires like Yuri Milner and Paul Allen want to keep slinging money at Sagan’s dream, more power to ’em.

May as well come right out and say this because there’s no way to soft-peddle it: De Void is flat-out envious of Taiwan-based UFO blogger Scott Waring, who claims his UFO Sightings Daily website has logged over 33,500,000 page views.

Since 2007, De Void has been attempting, at glacial speed – or sometimes, with rare flashes of motivation, at the velocity of a six-legged tortoise – to provide a bridge the mainstream media can use for a sober and/or reasoned discussion of The Great Taboo. It’s been a futile exercise, obviously, which I’d like to attribute to an inability to update my posts on a daily basis. But the sad truth of it is, I can’t touch Scott Waring; in fact, mentioning De Void in the same sentence with the guy makes me feel as scrambled as Dennis Hopper in “Apocalypse Now.”

Every now and then you get a revelation that makes you stop and look at life in a whole new way/CREDIT: petpixel.com

One quick scan of Waring’s home page is all you need. The man is up there with Magellan and de Gama; he doesn’t just post UFO vids, he offers detailed explanations (“Rods are cylinder shaped creatures that range in length from about 10 cm to 10 meters, and can travel at speeds of up to 300 mph”). But that’s just for starters.

He’s found a 10 km-long mothership in the Apollo 15 photo archives and located two sculpted Martian faces resembling the ancient stone gods of Mesopotamia. Also on Mars, he shows us ape heads and snake heads, leg bones and pelvic bones, a hermit crab, a squirrel, and hieroglyphic writing. He has found Marge Simpson on the Red Planet – no, I’m not making this up, check it out your own self – plus an alien outpost near one of our rovers. And a crashed spacecraft. And the fossilized corpse of “The Fallen King of Mars,” whom he calls “esse regem Martis diceretur.” Using NASA’s own photos, he’s discovered a female Martian sentinel monitoring one of those rovers from atop a faraway hill. He points out an alien pyramid on Asteroid RQ36. He has detected ET structures on the Saturn moon Iapetus and, thanks to China’s Chang’e 2 orbiter, an alien petroglyph face on a lunar crater. He identified architecture on planet Mercury and a lunar city photographed during the top-secret Apollo 20 mission. And remember, this is in addition to spreading the word on closer-to-home UFOs, like the “Two Alien Orbs Recorded In Infrared In Military Bombing Video Of Syria.”

And yes – the MSM is slurping up Waring’s revelations like dogs on fudge.

De Void became aware of the Waring phenomenon slowly, through osmosis, like a misty drizzle so soft and fine you have no idea until you shiver to life and wonder why you’re drenched. De Void woke up soaked to the bone last year when Waring posted videos alleging UFO activity around the International Space Station. Johnson Space Center’s hometown daily, the Houston Chronicle, made mention of it in a lazy slow-news day blurb, followed by The New York Daily News, The Washington Times, CNN and eventually the entire cacophony of trashcan bangers on Fleet Street.

NASA rarely responds to queries about UFOs and so far as De Void can tell, they shrugged off Waring’s 2014 post without comment. But of course, that silence can only mean the space agency’s hiding something, right? Obviously. OK, so on Nov. 15, Waring scored an absolute coup by alleging yet another UFO photo taken aboard the ISS, which included this explanation: “(Astronaut) Scott Kelly likes to send out photos of the view from the windows of the space station … and they look cool. This one however has a cigar shaped glowing UFO with a metallic body in it. The UFO is about 25 meters long and 150-200 meters away. It looks like Scott was trying to hint at the existence of aliens. Message received Scott, and thanks.”

Never mind that regular dudes immediately began working the contrast of Kelly’s photo and discovered additional images that appeared to be glassed reflections of the space station’s interiors. Yawn. But Waring caught fire, man, thanks to the echo chamber of Fox News, Time magazine, domestic and foreign news sites De Void never heard of before, all of them airing it out with varying modes of credulity. CBS even recruited physicist Michio Kaku to tell the world why it should consider alternate possibilities.

So hell yes, I’m jealous. I know what works, finally. It’s been staring me in the face for years. What an idiot I’ve been. I’m thankful that I can see clearly now

A little after 1 a.m., on Nov. 3, 1957, truck driver James Long was heading east out of sleepy Levelland, Texas, when he noticed something dark and huge and weird straddling the highway ahead. Long closed to within less than a football field of the mystery roadblock when it suddenly flared its lights, a move that simultaneously killed the engine of Long’s rig.

Oval-shaped and maybe 200 feet long, the enigma began to rise with a roar as Long stepped out to get a better look. At that point, he momentarily blacked out; upon regaining his bearings, he noticed thing was hovering about 200 feet above him. Then it went dark again, as if it never existed. But his vehicle was working again – and Long high-tailed it back to town to inform authorities. But the law was way ahead of him.

“Cheer up, boys — back in the old days when it laid a number on us, we had to pretend to clean it up; these days, we don’t even have to acknowledge it”/CREDIT: vestedway.com (and this is not Kate Vitasek’s quote)

Police, sheriff, and highway patrol units were already on the lookout for what motorists and local residents were describing not only as major UFO activity near and above area roads, but as the cause of electrical failure for vehicles in the immediate vicinity. Even the fire marshal’s engine began to sputter. In fact, the sheriff and his deputy reported an object that emitted a 50-yard wide beam of light before going dark in a snap of the fingers. And the activity was apparently regional, as witnesses from the east Texas burg of Farmington all the way west to the military base at White Sands, N.M., reported UFO encounters in the wee hours of 11/7/57. In a nod to the USSR’s just-launched Sputnik mission, the unresolved mystery was nicknamed Whatnik.

Whatnik – which created engine failures in at least eight vehicles – is obviously an old story. What’s new is that old story’s accessibility, and the accompanying anthology of literally hundreds of other Cold War cases. Drawn from original newspaper, magazine, military and civilian reports, “every UFO book available,” and collections from the likes of crusading atmospheric physicist Dr. James McDonald, this online collection at http://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/ is the culmination of a lifetime’s work from veteran researcher Loren Gross.

Recently digitized by Tom Tulien with the Sign Oral History Project, Gross’s archives constitute more than a simple data dump. Combined and compressed into such tight chronological structure that it reads with a timeless urgency, this is a massive library that has laid primary-source foundations for so many historians looking to put UFOs in context. Borrowing on a phrase from University of New Mexico astronomer Lincoln La Paz concerning their potential for revelation, Gross calls his narrative “UFOs: A History/The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.” It was completed in 2005 and circulated exclusively among a small clique of researchers.

“Remarkably,” Gross states in his introduction in comparing military accounts with civilian accounts, “there is very little overlap aside from well-known incidents. The Air Force explanations are a joke and I paid little attention to them. Having reviewed tens of thousands of sighting reports, I did not use every case while compiling the UFO histories – only the ones I thought were the best.”

A joke indeed. In a verdict that rendered the USAF a laughingstock to the residents of Levelland, the Pentagon kissed off the 11/3/57 incident this way: “Weather phenomenon of electrical nature, generally classified as ‘Ball Lightning’ or ‘St. Elmo’s Fire,’ caused by stormy conditions in the area, including mist, rain, thunderstorms and lightning.” Nevermind that the skies over Levelland that evening were relatively clear that evening, that not a drop of rain fell on the west Texas town during the event, or that some of these split-second “ball lightning” incidents elasticized for three to four minutes.

“Reading Loren Gross’ almost continuous narrative is like eating pistachios,” Project 1947 director and collaborator Jan Aldrich states in an email to De Void. “Once you start, you can’t stop.”

Spot on analogy. You can point and click just about anywhere in Gross’ monographs and find a surprise. The collection starts with the so-called “airship wave” of 1896 and concludes seven decades later, in 1963, just before the Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction experience injected a formidable level of subjectivity into the controversy. For sheer drama, Aldrich suggests new readers first hop the time machine back to a single night in 1952, July 22-23, in the midst of a nationwide flap involving jet-fighter scrambles, when it appeared as if air corridors from Virginia to New England were being deliberately tested for response capabilities. It almost has a cinematic quality.

This stuff matters today because those were the halcyon days, only nobody knew it. Back then, the federal investigation of UFOs was obliged to pay lip service to transparency, even at the expense of its credibility, like the ball-lightning snow job on Levelland. What a difference half a century makes.

As recently as 2005, the CIA was resisting, in federal court, a Federation of American Scientists lawsuit to disclose its secret budget – from 1963. Really. The FAS merely wanted verification of its independent analysis that the spooks’ budget 42 years earlier was $550 million. Today, 2015, without the existential threat of the Soviet Union, America’s black budget is nearly $60 billion and growing. Federal agencies routinely classify even the most innocuous information, because they can, and 4.5 million Americans hold security clearances. That’s more than the combined populations of the Northern Marianas, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, Wyoming, Vermont, the District of Columbia, Alaska, and both Dakotas. And not a one of these vetted employees is required to look stupid by making excuses for the elephant in the room.